


Unsound This Alarm [Mercury]

by MapleMooseMuffin



Series: The Courage of Stars [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (so alterante reality though it isn't explicitly stated), Angst, Canon Divergence, Grief, I started this fic two years ago and canon changed so much that I gave up on making it compliant, M/M, Minor Violence, Panic Attacks, Pre-Voltron: Legendary Defender, Solo Keith, Spirit Animals, and (some) healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 00:20:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17355389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MapleMooseMuffin/pseuds/MapleMooseMuffin
Summary: The footage from the Kerberos mission early this morning ended abruptly as the crew’s shuttle crashed into the moon. We presume the entire crew to be dead.It takes Keith one minute to disrupt the assembly, two weeks to get booted from the Garrison, and five months to track down the source of the constant dreams plaguing his grieving nights in the desert.Something is calling his name from the cliffs out in the sands. He feels it in his pulse, in his mind, in his bones, and all signs point back to the man he lost to the stars.Keith has never given up before. While the sun boils the desert sands and draws sticking sweat from his pores, plastering his hair to his face and dampening his clothes, he stares at the ceiling and imagines he can see the stars. If every speck of dirt is a sun, every crack a comet or asteroid belt, every chip a planet, then somewhere up there, simultaneously within reach and beyond all forms of contact, is Shiro. Staring down at the same planets, comets, and sun.One way or another, Shiro will reach out across the sky, and whenever he does, Keith will be there to take his hand.





	Unsound This Alarm [Mercury]

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone!
> 
> I can't explain how much this piece means to me. This was the very first Voltron fic idea I had, and now two years later I've finally finished and posted it. This is also the first in a series based on the albums Atlas: Space I and Atlas: Space II by Sleeping At Last. Their song Saturn is the epitome of sheith, and the rest of the albums inspired me so much I couldn't contain myself. Please give them a listen.  
> This fic and its title are inspired by [Mercury by Sleeping at Last](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJsF7sHpaPs).
> 
> Because canon answered far more questions about Keith's backstory than I ever expected, this fic went from canon compliant to canon divergent very quickly. So, I adjusted the series to be set in an alternate reality that's very similar to the timeline we see in VLD. An important note is that in this reality, Shiro and Keith are only 3 years apart in age. In this fic, Keith is 17 and Shiro is 20.
> 
> Also, while attempts were made at researching how the military works, I'm sure there are inaccuracies. I'm sorry if it's distracting.
> 
> A thousand thanks to [nonamemanga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonamemanga) and [Anglophileslytherin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anglophileslytherin/pseuds/Anglophileslytherin) for your tireless support and beta reading over the years. I wouldn't be here without you.
> 
>  
> 
> May this mean as much to one of you as it meant to me.
> 
> Enjoy!~

_No one can unring this bell_  
_Unsound this alarm_  
_Unbreak my heart new_

 

 

            Standing in the center of the K line in the main gym, mid-assembly, Keith’s world drops out from under him. His mind goes blank while he stares up at the stage, where Iverson stands with his mouth stretched in a grim downward slope. Keith blinks once and replays the pair of sentences that simply don’t make sense.

            _The footage from the Kerberos mission early this morning ended abruptly as the crew’s shuttle crashed into the moon. We presume the entire crew to be dead._

Iverson is quiet for the moment. He must be reviewing his speech and realizing he misspoke. Keith grows impatient waiting for the amendment, because the longer they stand in silence the deeper that fallacy sinks into their skin, and if Iverson doesn’t speak up soon, people are going to start to get the wrong idea. Cadets are already shifting awkwardly under the uncomfortable weight of his mistake, starting to mumble questions, starting to take his announcement seriously, when it can’t be right. It can’t be.

            Iverson closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and speaks again, forcing a silence over the assembly as quickly as if he’d vacuumed the sound out of the air.

            “The footage of the crash came in at o’ four hundred hours this morning.” Keith frowns. Iverson is looking them all in the face and continuing with this faulty report. It’s almost as if he’s lying. “Due to an error during the landing attempt – ” He _is_ lying. “ – made by the pilot, First Lieutenant Takashi Shirogane –”

            “ _Bullshit!_ ”

            Keith isn’t aware he’s yelling until after he’s shoved his way out of line and stomped into the center aisle.

            “Takashi Shirogane is the Garrison’s pride and fucking joy. He’s never made a careless mistake in his life!”

            “Stand down, cadet!” Iverson locks eyes with Keith, that grim slope twisting into something sharper, less mourning, more angry. “Even heroes are human. It’s thanks to a piloting error that the entire crew was lost, regardless of your personal feelings.”

            “ _Fuck you!_ ”

            Keith is hot, hotter than he’s ever been. He stands there sweating and shaking, his breaths coming short while Iverson gestures toward the sides of the gym, where officers stand by. Keith can hardly think, but the words come tearing out of his throat on their own. “Shiro practiced landing sims every day for three _months_ in prep for this mission. He wouldn’t crash!”

            There are barked orders of “Stand down, Kogane,” all around him as hands grab at his upper arms and shoulders, pulling him. A desperation blooms under their touch and he fights to stay in place.

            “You’re lying! You’re lying about Shiro and it’s _fucked up_! Is this how you treat a model student? Your god damn golden boy?”

            Three officers drag him back. Keith digs his nails into their arms and claws to pry them off, but their uniforms provide enough protection to lessen the sting. When he’s lifted off the ground, he kicks and writhes.

            “See Cadet Kogane to the counseling center at once.”

            “Shiro looks up to you!” He’s screeching at this point. “He thinks you’re a great fucking leader. Who the fuck do you think you are? You don’t know Shiro! Shiro would never-”

            He takes a blow to the gut and sputters out, falling just lax enough to be dragged out of the gym and down the hall, toward the administration wing. Bile rises up from his aching stomach to the back of his throat. The sting of it brings tears to his eyes, and once they’re there, there’s no stopping the sobs that wrack his body, angry and violent.

            Keith flails, jerks, cusses, spits, claws, and bites until the officers bend his arms behind his back and yank a fistful of his hair to enforce their control. Then he sobs, and sobs, and sobs, shuddering with outrage at the sickening lies and marring of Shiro’s reputation. He doesn’t understand what’s happening, doesn’t understand _why_ it’s happening. He’s never been so helpless or terrified.

 

 

            He isn’t suspended. The higher ups spare him, solely on the grounds of extreme grief. They do, however, make the counseling sessions they’re recommending to all students close to ‘the deceased’ mandatory in his case. Twice a week they expect him to drag himself into their offices and _talk_. It’s something Keith has never been good at, and it’s not going to fix what Iverson’s done, but he forces himself to comply, if only to keep them from sending more officers to drag him in.

            The counselor’s office is small and unlike the media stereotypes. There’s a large desk, a bushy plant, a couple filing cabinets, and a plastic chair that squeaks when Keith sits down. He eyes the counselor warily as they go through with the mandatory greetings.

            She begins with a question. “How are you feeling, compared to yesterday?”

            He isn’t sure how to answer that. He’s still just as angry, just as outraged and sickened by the insane lies that have swept up the entire Garrison like a plague and spread out into the media. The world is calling Shiro a failure. He knows the counselor expects him to say he’s feeling better now. People always seem to think that distance and time will quell his rage, like he has no passion or sense of indignation, like his temper is impulsive. That pisses him off, too.

            He’s just so… “Angry.”

            A one-word answer, but it has her writing something down before she presses for more. “Why are you angry?”

            It’s the stupidest question Keith has ever heard. “Because of everyone!” He raises his voice loud enough for it to echo in the small room. The sound of it reverberating has him checking himself, gritting his teeth as he explains himself before she can ask him to. “No one is saying _anything_ except how much of a tragedy this all is, or how it’s such a fucking shame, what happened to those men.”

            The counselor allows enough time for silence to ring in Keith’s ears again before she asks, in a tone Keith has learned is meant to imply reproach, “And you don’t see it as a tragedy?”

            He tries not to claw at his jeans. From that question alone he can tell this is going to be pointless. “It’s only a tragedy,” he grits out, “if it’s true.”

            She raises an eyebrow and writes something with her left hand without looking away from him. He feels the edge of a glare in his eyes even as he tries to hold it back. He wants to be respectful. He would be out on the street if it wasn’t for the counselor stepping in yesterday. But he’s never been the best at self-restraint under normal circumstances, and this is the angriest he’s been in years.

            “Let’s try something else,” she says softly. It catches him off guard, makes him wary. “You and Takashi were close?”

            “ _Shiro_.” There are only a few people in this world allowed to use Shiro’s first name, and she is _not_ one of them. “He’s my family.”

            “You’re related?” She gives the slightest head tilt that says she knows full well the answer to her question.

            It hits Keith now that all of this is fake. Everything about this conversation is unnatural and forced. She’s saying all the right things to steer the conversation to whatever epiphany she wants to make him have, to turn off his anger and make him ‘feel better’, make him stop being such a problem for the Garrison, and Keith’s seen it all before. The pacifying tone of authority figures who play the good cop, when the brazen bad cop’s demands for respect didn’t work. This has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with their social hierarchy and the Rules.

            He answers, “No,” because it’s what she wants, and he doesn’t have the energy to call her out, to sit here and argue in arbitrary circles. On another day, maybe, but his constant rage has worn him down. “I was a foster kid before I got emancipated last year. Went through a lot of houses and never felt at home. Shiro’s the only person who ever made me feel welcome.”

            “You must have a lot of fond memories of him.” Keith glares at her and the cloying tone she’s taken. She’s dancing around whatever point she wants to make, and he hates it, mistrusts it. If she can’t be direct with him, she probably doesn’t think he’ll like what she has to say.

            There’s another silence. It takes him a long moment to realize she’s waiting for him to agree with her rhetorical sentence. He’s not going to. This is all a huge waste of time.

            “Maybe it would be good for you to get together with some of his friends. Reminisce and share all your memories of Takashi.”

            The plastic chair grunts as it scrapes against the floor when Keith stands.

            The counselor pushes on in a rush, trying to get her words in before Keith can open his mouth. “I know it may not feel like it, but in times of grief and loss, it’s important we keep in touch with those still living around us. Otherwise we become distant from life ourselves.”

            Keith leans against the desk, smacking his hands harder on the surface than he intended. “ _Shiro_ isn’t dead! And if you’re not going to listen to me, why the hell am I here?”

            “I know this is hard for you, Keith,” she tries. Keith growls and turns away, kicking at the chair on his way to the door. It rattles and tips over. “You’re clearly upset by everything that’s happened,” – he jerks the door open – “but I think we should talk more on Wednesday!”

            He slams it shut when he leaves.

 

 

            Sunday night, they bring the few belongings Shiro left behind at the Garrison to Keith’s room. Keith’s rage has had two full days to burn in him since the announcement, and the knock on the door is unwelcome and met with a snarl.

            An apologetic officer says something along the lines of “He’d want _you_ to have these,” as he offers a cardboard box of folded clothing and assorted items from Shiro’s locker. It’s deposited in Keith’s arms and followed with a “If you ever need us, Keith, we’re here for you,” but the words sound emptier than Keith’s stomach. He hasn’t left his room since the counseling session Saturday afternoon.

            Keith steps back into his dorm room and manages to kick the door closed before he feels himself shuddering apart under the sudden, impossible weight of the box and everything it holds. He staggers and drops the thing in his desk chair, but the weight remains. Increases. It saps him dry, transforming him into a used battery – discarded and worthless. Left behind.

            He stumbles to his bed and barely finds the strength to crawl under the covers. He feels nauseous. He can only stare at the bedsheets, white and grainy, mass produced and cheap, Garrison regulation. Some void has opened up inside him, as though he swallowed a wormhole, the vast emptiness of space churning amidst his stomach acid. It makes him think of Shiro, cut off from Earth billions of kilometers away, floating out in that void. Weightless, soundless.

            Lifeless.

            Keith feels the emptiness swell and swell, until he feels lifeless, too.

 

 

            When his phone buzzes out his Monday alarm, Keith snatches it up with a restored vigor, swiping off the alert and drawing up his email app the same time he draws himself up out of bed. Shiro always sends him video logs to start off the week. Coded links to simple, stupid clips that are more like diary entries or letters than anything, but that capture the daily lives of the crew as they drift closer to their goal. Last week he’d said they were nearly there.

            Keith drums his fingers across his desk as he watches his phone load the app, taking forever thanks to the dorm’s shitty wifi. His stomach growls, loud and aching from being neglected for so long. Keith inches his drumming hand towards the box of Pop Tarts on his desk, keeping his eyes on his screen as it blinks white, flickers, and slowly loads his inbox.

            No new messages. He refreshes.

            He’s got half a strawberry Pop Tart in his mouth when the app reloads and shows him his inbox again, unchanged. He taps refresh. Finishes off the pastry. No new messages. Refreshes again.

            It takes six Pop Tarts and twelve refreshes to quiet the ache in his stomach. When his inbox comes up empty again, Keith slumps back to his bed, falling heavily on the mattress. There’s always been a lag between Shiro’s sending and his receiving of the codes Matt taught them, since information has to be transmitted between several satellites, bouncing back over seven billion kilometers. Keith’s never been a patient person, but as he sits here now, tapping ‘refresh’ and feeling the encroaching return of that internal void, he prays the lag’s been drawn out longer than usual this time around.

            The next video _must_ be on its way. When it arrives, Keith will march down to Iverson's office, burst through the door, shove a grainy clip of Shiro and Matt doing zero-G backflips in his face, and ask if _that_ looks like a pilot error.

            Outside his window, the flag flies, visible in the center of the quad. The Garrison can't even keep the damn thing at half-mast. There were just two days of ‘mourning’: the Friday of the announcement, and the Saturday following. The weekend lasted longer than the supposedly lost soldiers’ memory, and now, the government flies their flag high, as though they have something to be proud of. Any pride Keith ever took in being a cadet vanished faster than the 'loving memory' of First Lieutenant Takashi Shirogane from the hearts of his peers. These people make him sick – he can feel it, hot and scorching under his skin. If Shiro really _were_ dead, this would be how they’d remember him? It’d break his heart, if he were here to see, and that’s probably what pisses Keith off the most.

            His secondary alarm buzzes onto screen. He dismisses it, and refreshes his inbox again.

 

 

            The counselor speaks to him like he’s a child.

            “How are you feeling today, Keith?”

            “Empty.” It takes an enormous amount of effort to ease out that simple word.

            “Your professors marked you absent for all classes this week.”

            She gestures to her clipboard, though he isn’t meant to read whatever she has noted there. Keith responds with a slow blink. His hand shifts toward his phone. He should check again.

            “No one’s noticed you in the mess hall, either.” There’s a point in her tone now, and the raise of her brow. “Have you left your room at all?”

            “No.”

            There’s a pause, room for him to say more, but he can’t be bothered. The counselor tries to wheedle it out of him. “Why not?”

            “I’m sick of people.” If it weren’t for the officer waiting outside the counselor’s office right now, Keith wouldn’t even be here. But somehow his grief is unseemly even when he keeps it behind the closed door of his dorm room, and they dragged him here to fix it. “Everyone keeps saying he’s dead.”

            She ignores that. “Is holing yourself up in your room really what Takashi would have wanted?”

            “Shiro’s not dead.” Keith slides his phone out of his pocket and goes through the motions. The app loads faster here, in the administrative wing. There are still no new messages. He refreshes, then puts the phone away.

            “Don’t you think your negativity might be spoiling your good memories of him?”

            “No.” Keith scowls. She writes something down.

            The way she takes in a deep breath and sends him some sort of concerned look makes Keith brace himself for the inevitable ‘Why don’t you think he’s dead?’ question. It’s not one he has the energy for today. Which isn’t saying much, honestly.

            She surprises him, asking instead, “Why don’t you tell me about Takashi?”

            He’s thrown off enough to frown at her. “What do you mean?”

            “Tell me who he was, what he was like.”

            Whatever her angle is, Keith can’t decipher it. “You know. Everyone here knows. Shiro’s the poster boy, the universal favorite. What do you want me to say, he’s a good man? You can get enough of that shit on the news.”

            It’s the largest amount of words he’s managed to string together at once since their last meeting. The frustration and exhaustion that wells up from her question, combined with his awful physical state from eating nothing but two boxes worth of Pop Tarts in the past five days and sleeping either too much or not at all the past few nights, fans the flames inside him, leaving him angry and impatient as well as tired and fed up. It’s a dangerous combination.

            “I know who he was to all of us. But who was he to _you_ , Keith? I want to hear about the person _you_ remember as Takashi Shirogane. Why was he family to you?”

            The constant past tense has Keith gritting his teeth. “I told you. Shiro is the only one who ever made me feel at home.” It’s such a vulnerable, stupid thing when he puts it into words, and he really doesn’t think she has any right to these thoughts. No one has the right to anything they’ve been doing, saying, or thinking this week. And yet here they are, with an officer at the door keeping him trapped in this box, pretending everything’s all right. And they think _he’s_ wrong for saying Shiro’s still alive?

            The counselor nods and makes an approving sound, scribbling something down that has Keith’s stomach churning. “And how did he do that?”

            “Does it matter?”

            She crosses her arms on the desk. “I think talking through this will help, yes.”

            “I don’t need help.”

            “There’s no shame in it, Keith. Everyone goes through hard times.”

            “Having everyone pretend your best friend is dead isn’t exactly what I’d call a typical _hard time_.” He leans forward as he snaps, too late to restrain himself. The counselor doesn’t flinch, only frowns and makes another note. Keith curls his hand into a fist. Takes a deep breath. Patience.

            The thought comes in Shiro’s voice, rather than his own. His throat tightens.

            “Shiro was your best friend?”

            The use of ‘Shiro’ takes the slightest bit of tension off, enough for Keith to swallow against the tightness and nod, mumbling a hoarse “Yeah.”

            “How did that happen?”

            He draws up the memory and is hit with an unexpected, almost painful wave of some sort of nostalgic longing. For a few seconds he’s overpowered by just how profoundly he misses Shiro.

            It takes him a long moment to push that aside and speak again.

            “They… assigned him to me. Sort of.”

            The counselor motions for him to go on.

            He sighs. “My first semester I was labeled a problematic cadet, and since Shiro was in the advanced track and lined up to be a TA, they made him mentor me. I guess to test him. I thought he was going to be some kind of mini-Iverson clone, with a stick shoved so far up his-” Keith meets the counselor’s eyes and catches himself, coughing gracelessly to cover what he’d been about to say. He tries to reword the sentence in his head, but struggles.

            “So you started off on the wrong foot, then?”

            Keith thinks that over. “I guess. But Shiro didn’t talk down to me. He praised me for my hard work – you know, everyone acts like if you’ve got good instincts you don’t have to work hard, and it’s such bullshit. Everyone was always telling me I was so talented but because I was a natural it made me full of myself, like I didn’t have a right to be proud.”

            He’s on the edge of a rant, a rant he’s thrown at Shiro before, and he suddenly becomes aware of himself teetering on that edge while the memories of all his frustrations flood back in. If he crosses that line, this won’t be about Shiro anymore, it’ll just be about him, and that feels selfish. Enough so to make Keith stop and swallow back what he was going to say.

            “He treated you like an equal?” the counselor asks. It hits something inside him, hot and cold at the same time, because yes. That’s exactly what he did, that’s exactly why he mattered so much, right from the start.

            “He’s the only one who ever did.”

 

 

            The counselor gets Keith out of his Thursday and Friday classes with the strict caveat that he must take three meals a day in the mess hall for the rest of the week. Keith thinks of the promise he made to Shiro in the last days before the mission’s launch, and accepts the deal, knowing that anymore absences could put his grades in jeopardy.

            Returning to the public eye is hard, after five solid days of isolation, even more so when people constantly stare at him as he sits at the far corner of a half full table and picks at imitation scrambled eggs.

            A few brave souls go so far as to approach him. They’re usually Shiro’s friends, young adults in officer uniforms who walk up with straight backs and too much composure. Keith’s hand tightens around his fork anytime an officer comes near him, anxious that they’ll try to order him around. He just _can’t_ take authority right now.

            But the visitors don’t reprimand him for his crooked collar or untidy hair. They just offer smiles that look more like grimaces and say “If you ever need us, Keith.” Sometimes they finish the sentence, usually they don’t, and nine times out of ten they put a hand on his shoulder. Keith jerks away every time and scowls at his meal.

            The professors who walk by give him long, pitying stares. Keith’s used to those, at least, has seen the expression on every young blonde hopeful mother who visited the group homes, looking for the perfect child to rescue from the system. They never much cared for his temper, and he never much cared for being patronized. These professors are no better than the wealthy wannabe Mother Teresa’s looking at him like he’s something pathetic and helpless. Like an abused animal in a shelter cage. Keith could only garner this much sympathy from them in a normal week if _he_ died in a tragic shuttle crash, and then, if Shiro’s example is anything to go off of, they’d move on within a couple of hours. The longer Keith sits in the mess hall under their gaze, the more he thinks about it and feels the anger and disgust churn inside him along with whichever mass-produced meal he’s been picking at with a plastic fork, and before long he has to leave or risk another outburst.

 

 

            Worse, though, he learns on Monday, is the way they've been _using_ Shiro.

            Keith’s week begins with simulations, the focus this quarter being on bleak situations and damage control, survival skills and problem solving under intense conditions. Iverson sends him into a solo run, designed to test crisis management when the rest of the flight team is unavailable for one reason or another.

            As the doors slide closed behind him with a _shick_ , Keith finds that the once familiar interior of the faux shuttle is no longer inviting. Suddenly it feels foreign and threatening for reasons he can’t discern. Not a detail has changed – Keith’s done solo runs before, and in all honesty prefers the solitude, so the two empty seats he passes on his way to the pilot’s chair can’t be it. The safety belt locks with a click that has Keith swallowing through a suddenly dry throat, pulse quickening. The straps are a constricting pressure against his chest, and he tugs to try and adjust them, but can’t seem to find a comfortable setting that maintains any sense of safety. When the screens around him blink on with the loaded simulation, Keith feels a chill run down his spine.

            The mission details are written out beside a sixty second counter, giving Keith enough context to understand his goal – land safely despite several systems failures. The planet they have him crashing towards is uneven and rocky, and a poor landing location will result in ‘death’.

            He pictures Shiro sitting in a chair like this, and it wipes the briefing from his mind.

            When the timer reaches zero, the shuttle begins to shake and shudder, imitating the sensation of hurdling uncontrollably through the atmosphere. Keith is freezing cold as he clings to the controls and tries to no avail to gain some stability. The land below is huge, gray, and quickly approaching while the safety belts cut into his chest. He can’t breathe. Something’s wrong with the filtering in here – whatever makes it sound proof must be cutting off oxygen, or there’s a pressure breach in the shuttle, or his belt is too tight. He lets go of the controls to tug at the harness but it won’t loosen, and he can’t breathe, _he can’t breathe_.

            Was this what Shiro went through? What he saw as they crashed into Kerberos? Is this how it happened?

            He yelps as a screeching alarm goes off without warning all around him, the lights flashing bright red and throwing distracting shadows across the room. Keith is panting, shivering, and sweating all at once, unable to focus on anything besides an endless cycle of images of Shiro in this very situation, scrambling desperately at the switches and buttons across the dashboard as Keith does now, desperate to stop the chaos. Nothing is working, the alarms are blaring louder, and Keith _can’t breathe._

            The planet’s surface rushes up to meet the jerking shuttle. This would be the last thing Shiro saw. The simulation cuts out just before the bone crushing impact, leaving Keith a shuddering mess bound in his seat. He scratches himself in his desperation to wrench the seat belt free from its clasp, and gasps for air when it finally clicks open.

            Outside, Iverson waits to berate him. "Where is your head, cadet?” he barks when Keith stumbles out on trembling legs. “Do you think you're always going to have your team to back you up? Or are you so arrogant as to think you'll never find yourself in an emergency situation?"

            He’s ruthless as he shouts in Keith's face, his words forceful enough to send spittle flicking out haphazardly. Keith has never seen him so angry, but he can hardly care about that as he tries to even out his breathing. Whatever just happened wasn’t his fault.

            "Unclog your ears and pull your head out of your ass, Kogane. You may be the top of your class, but an asteroid belt or a mechanical failure won't give a rat's ass about rank."

            The cursing is new, too. It's usually reserved for the suspension threats Keith hasn't faced since his first months at the Garrison, excluding his 'outburst' at the assembly. Keith wonders if Iverson is going to grab him by the jacket. He certainly seems like he wants to, and Keith is torn between fear and outrage that he’s being blamed for a panic attack when _Iverson_ is the one who just put him through the same situation he claims killed his best friend.

            A panic attack, his thoughts echo with sudden clarity. He’s just had a panic attack.

            "I shouldn't need to tell you that the pilot of the Kerberos mission was top of his class, too,” Iverson says. “Look how well that title served him when it came down to it."

            Keith feels the acidic rise of bile in the back of his throat. His pulse quickens again, heart rattling in his chest as his blood pressure rises so fast he hears nothing beyond the roar of it in his ears.

            “Every pilot needs to be prepared for disasters like the one of the Kerberos crash. I don’t want to lose more good men because a hotshot prodigy thinks he’s so good he doesn’t need to know the error protocols.”

            It sinks in then. They’re using Shiro as an example of what not to be.

            Keith feels himself flush and imagines it’s vibrant from the intense heat he feels all over. He hardly takes in a breath before he’s shouting, hissing and spitting like a wild animal. He isn’t even sure what he’s saying. The words spill out faster than he can think them, his outrage taking whatever form it can find in phrases like “How fucking dare you” and “Shiro was one of the best damned pilots this place has ever seen!” Iverson honest to God _flinches_ at the force of Keith's rage, before returning fire, barking back that Keith has no respect, that he expects everything to fall into his lap because he has natural talent.

            That winds Keith up further, because that’s what everyone has been telling him since he got into this place, and it’s part of what had him rebelling two years ago, part of what made them assign Shiro to him, because no one gets that he _is_ trying. He’s been trying, been studying and working his ass off since day one, and everyone assumes his skills are entirely talent, and no one _understands_.

            Iverson shouts something about demerits, discipline, and expulsion, but all of it is lost in the chaos of Keith’s rage as he screams himself hoarse and storms off. An officer is sent after him.

 

 

            It takes the counselor an hour and a half to talk down the administrators. Keith sits in her office alternating between checking his email and cursing himself for losing control. He has no plans for what to do if he gets expelled, no home to go to or job to fall on, and more than that, he _promised_ Shiro he’d stay focused.

            When she comes in, shutting the door behind her with a huff, Keith watches her warily, doubtful that she’ll have good news.

            “Well,” she says, tucking her files up against her chest and crossing the room to her desk, “Commander Iverson isn’t happy.” Keith could have told her that himself. “But,” she says, settling into her chair, “he also cares about your mental health. After a long talk, he agreed you shouldn’t be expelled for a panic attack.”

            If it weren’t for this woman, he’d already be out on the street thanks to his outburst at the assembly. A sudden mix of guilt and gratitude rattles in his chest and has him mumbling out an earnest “Thank you.”

            “I can’t keep saving you, Keith,” she says. He meets the stern look she gives him and nods once. “One more strike, and you’re out.”

            “I’m sorry,” he says. “I just…” He can’t find the right words to finish the thought. He’s been a wreck ever since the announcement, and he knows it, but he can’t stop, doesn’t exactly _want_ to stop. He still believes there’s been a mistake. Has to believe it, because it’s the only thing that makes sense to him, and the fact that no one seems to agree is infuriating, depressing, and isolating.

            “You need to get a hold of yourself. Just because you weren’t expelled doesn’t mean we aren’t taking any action whatsoever. Today’s proven that your case is very unique and severe, so from now on our sessions will be doubled. You and I will meet four times a week, on Saturdays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Since you’re already here, we can start today’s session.”

            Keith nods and shifts in the plastic chair. He can’t imagine that a couple extra hours of sitting here talking about things everyone already knows is going to help him. Talk won’t bring Shiro back, and nothing they say in these confidential meetings is going to convince the rest of the world that Shiro’s still alive. But fighting this when she is the only reason he isn’t packing his bags right now seems like the wrong choice.

            “What do you think happened today?” she asks. Keith forces himself to swallow, throat running dry again at the memory.

            “I… the simulator freaked me out.”

            “Why?”

            He shifts and focuses on the pen in her hand rather than meeting her eyes. “I felt claustrophobic in the shuttle… and I couldn’t stop thinking about him during the run. They said he crashed – there was some pilot error and he just…”

            The images rise up again, of Shiro strapped into the pilot’s chair of a shuttle hurdling toward Kerberos’s surface, Matt and Commander Holt yelling at him from their places as alarms blare and warning lights flash, and Keith screws his eyes shut and grits his teeth against the agony those thoughts bring, the echo of breathlessness coming back. He can’t stand imagining Shiro like that.

            “Last time we talked,” the counselor says gently, “you told me Shiro wasn’t dead.”

            “He’s not,” Keith says.

            “Then why do you think that simulation made you so upset?”

            “It’s… It’s the principle, okay? They’re all saying the mission crashed, and then the _first_ sim they give us is a crash scenario? That’s just _wrong_!”

            “That’s not what you just told me, though,” she says. “You said you were upset because you were imagining Shiro’s-”

            “Well when everyone’s saying he died like that, you can’t help but picture it, even if it’s not true!” Keith is aware of the shaking in his hands. His breath shudders as he tries to get control of himself before he makes another scene.

            “Don’t you think that maybe you’re coming to terms with the truth?”

            “I _know_ the truth.”

            She gives him a long look and writes something down. Keith takes a few deep breaths and tries to ignore the sudden urge to cry he feels tingling at the back of his throat and the corner of his eyes.

            “Would you say Shiro made you feel proud of yourself?”

            She always redirects things back to the past when Keith proves to be too stubborn. It puts him on edge because he can’t tell where she’s going or what she’s trying to get him to say. Cautiously, he answers, “Shiro made me feel like I belonged here. He let me know when my instincts were right, when I was improving or when I was headed in the right direction.”

            “Do you think you’re going in the right direction now?” Keith narrows his eyes at her when she keeps her tone neutral. He can’t tell if he’s being reprimanded or not. “Do you think Shiro would be proud?”

            “What are you saying?”

            “What do you think Shiro would say if he knew you were taking out your feelings on the people around you?”

            She’s using Shiro, just like Iverson.

            “You have no right to tell me what Shiro would think!” Keith spits. “What makes you think you know him better than I do? You and Iverson and all the damn professors – his _heroes_ – are _using_ him, like some public square example of what not to do, and if you all really think he’s dead, like you were so quick to give up on him and say, then isn’t that fucking disrespectful to his memory? But you’re going to tell me _I’m_ the one in the wrong?”

            The crew was announced _presumably_ dead. Assumed. Estimated. Probably, likely, possibly. It all adds up to a lack of evidence, a 'good enough' answer for a mystery no one can be bothered to solve, and it makes Keith so sick. Shiro had _admired_ Iverson. He'd admired nearly every staff member in the whole damn Garrison, and not a single one of them gives a shit now that the excitement of a pair of prodigy poster children being sent off planet has had five months to die down.

            “I feel like our meetings have been going in circles. I want us to focus on a solution to your anger rather than repeatedly arguing about it.”

            “How do you expect to fix this then? The reason I’m so angry is because everyone’s going around ruining Shiro’s memory,” he catches himself there, because memory would mean Shiro is dead. “His _reputation_ , I mean, by saying he’s dead and that _he_ killed the crew, that all of this is his fault when there’s no way in hell.”

            “I think part of your problem is that you idolize him.”

            Keith blinks. Flushes. “I don’t _idolize_ Shiro.”

            The counselor gives him a look, the meaning of which is lost on him. “You don’t think so?”

            “No. You just don’t understand. You don’t know him like I do.”

            “And how is that?”

            Keith hesitates, partly because none of this is any of her damn business, but mostly because he’s never said this out loud. But she’s staring at him, expecting an answer with a slowly raising brow that has him shifting again in his seat, the creaking of the plastic adding to the awkwardness. Softly, Keith says “He changed my life.”

            It sounds dumb out loud, and she says “That sounds like idolizing to me,” which makes him more uncomfortable. Makes him feel defensive.

            He crosses his arms and slinks back in his chair, turning his head to stare at the wall and avoid her gaze. “It’s not. Shiro’s the Garrison’s favorite everything, and a lot of people around here think he’s perfect, but I saw him when he wasn’t, I know him better than that. So I don’t idolize him, I’m not, like, blind to his flaws or anything. I just…”

            “Just?” She presses him for the rest of that thought, but Keith’s run out of steam, and feels too vulnerable already to go deeper, to explain his feelings.

            “Never mind,” he mumbles, and drops his gaze to his feet when the heat flares in his cheeks.

 

 

            In the mess hall on Friday during lunch hour, Keith overhears some cadets talking about Shiro. He pauses, standing a few feet from their table with his tray in hand, and listens as the boy whose back is to him continues his thought.

            “I mean if you go around acting like you’re hot shit like that, karma’s gonna come around and bite you in the ass, you know? I get that Holt was picked since his dad was the head of the mission, but Shirogane probably kissed the whole administration wing’s asses. I mean, first lieutenant at age twenty? Come on. If you get in like that, it’s no wonder you end up blowing yourself up.”

            Keith grips the tray so tight his hands shake.

            “Speaking of blowing, how many dicks do you think he had to suck-”

            Keith barely feels the burn of the soup that splatters his chest when his lunch clatters to the floor. He’s more focused on swinging his tray at the back of the cadet’s head. The plastic cracks on impact.

            He’s already tossed the shattered tray to the floor by the time the cadet’s finished reeling and turned to see what the hell just happened. Keith punches him square in the jaw, knocking him out of his chair and onto staggering feet. His friends jump up as Keith launches himself at him, and the cadet seems to finally understand what’s going on, or at least that he’s being attacked, because he throws his own punch that leaves Keith’s jaw aching.

            It doesn’t stop him.

            Keith is shouting, has been shouting. He can hear his own voice echoing around the room, which has fallen silent aside from the four of them – mostly Keith – screaming at one another. The cadet trips and stumbles back, and Keith finds himself shoving the other before he can even think about it. The cadet catches himself from falling by grabbing Keith’s shoulders, and shoots his knee up once, twice, three times into Keith’s stomach. Keith folds in at the pain and chokes out a cough. He has to take a couple heartbeats like that to breathe.

            The cadet thinks it’s over. He shouts something along the lines of “What the fuck?” at Keith while Keith trembles and widens his stance. Then he rockets upwards, checking his shoulder into the cadet’s chest and turning to tackle him as he falls down.

            “Don’t ever say shit like that about him!” Keith’s throat is already raw from screeching, but he shouts anyway. He sits on the guy’s chest and swings his fists, over, and over, and over. It’s hard to see through the furious tears flooding over his face, but he feels each hit connect with skin and falls into the rhythm.

            The friends try to rip Keith away from the cadet. They wind their arms around his waist and jerk, pressing into the new bruise on his stomach. The pain limits his ability to struggle, and it’s just enough for them to lift him back, but as soon as he’s regained his balance Keith kicks backwards, hitting one of them in the knee. The person behind him yelps and lets go, and Keith falls back into place, beating and screeching like a wild animal. Hands immediately wrap around him again.

            When they get enough people to force him away from the cadet, he resorts to clawing and biting, jerking around in the tight grips until he’s bruising himself as much as anyone else.

 

 

            By the time they’ve finished quarantining Keith to solitary confinement in a cell like room in administration wing, he’s already worked himself up enough to the point of throwing up, and walks, uncontrollably shuddering, beside Iverson as the commander escorts him to the counselor’s office for the last time.

            Iverson stays, and once the door is shut, he begins ripping into Keith. Never in all his years, he says. Vicious, animalistic violence. Uncalled for, inexcusable. Keith’s lucky he’s not under arrest. Dishonorable discharge.

            The form is presented in a stiff gesture that leaves no room for argument. Keith takes it gingerly and looks over the lines, reading his own name in neat print. It doesn’t feel real.

            He looks up as Iverson turns toward the door, and after a moment moves to follow him, as he had been before, but the counselor stops him.

            “Keith, sit down a moment. I’d like to talk to you, one last time.”

            He stares at her, wondering what on earth she would have to say, and why she would bother at this point. After a long moment she quietly repeats “Sit,” and gestures to the chair. He crosses the room and takes the creaking seat.

            “You need to find a better way to work out your aggression,” she says. “Otherwise you’re going to end up behind bars.”

            Keith thinks that’s a bit of a drastic thing to say. He doesn’t say anything. She redirects.

            “Have you heard about the stages of grief?” She shuffles a couple papers beside her, looking for something. Keith raises an eyebrow.

            “Isn’t it late to bring that up?”

            “From what I’ve seen over these past few weeks, I’m positive you’re in the second stage.” She finds what she was searching for: a long, skinny pamphlet of some kind. “The good news is that means you’re finally done with the first stage: denial.”

            Keith remembers being eight, remembers what they told him then, and remembers that that’s not how this works. The stages are fluid, and fluctuate.

            “I’m not in denial,” he says. “And this isn’t some kind of bullshit grief runoff anger. That guy was running his mouth and being a douchebag!”

            “ _Keith._ ” The look she gives him has him swallowing down the anger that already started welling up. “Trust me. I’m a professional. I’m just concerned for your wellbeing. You haven’t had discipline issues like this since your first year here.”

            “You would have hit that kid too if you’d heard what he said,” Keith mutters. He thinks it over then, and corrects himself. “If he’d said it about _your_ family.”

            “No, I wouldn’t have,” she says. Keith crosses his arms. “I have enough composure to filter out my anger when someone says something that upsets me. _You_ had that, too, not so long ago. You need to find whatever it was that helped you calm down after your first year, and get that back.”

            Keith grits his teeth. “Shiro.”

            She gives him a confused look.

            “ _Shiro_ was what calmed me down.”

            The counselor sighs. “Keith. It maybe feels that way to you, because maybe you made the change after meeting him, but only _you_ have the power to make that change within yourself. You’re the one who decided to change.”

            It sounds like a direct opposition to what she said moments before about finding what had calmed him in the first place. He frowns at her and says, “I’ve never felt the kind of calm that I feel when I’m with him.”

            One of their last nights together before the mission launch comes to mind. Shiro and Keith snuck up onto a roof, as they were wont to do, and laid out beside one another on their backs, staring up at the vast expanse of space that was soon to be Shiro’s temporary home. Despite all of the churning anxiety in either of them, as Shiro pointed out the distant glowing disks of Mercury and Jupiter in the dusky light of the coming night and explained to Keith when and how he could find them, a sort of peace settled in Keith’s chest. When Shiro turned his head to the side to look Keith in the eye and remind him that they would be looking out at the same planets and the same sun while he was away, Keith saw in his eyes that he’d felt it, too.

            The counselor shifts in her chair, shuffling the papers at her side. “I want to help you work through this, Keith, but the healing process is something you need to carry out on your own. Especially now that I won’t be available to you anymore.”

            She sets down the papers once she’s straightened them out, and rises out of her chair, the pamphlet in hand. Keith watches her come towards him and rises to his feet as well when she stops at his side.

            “Take this,” she says, placing the paper in his hands. “It’ll help you understand what you’re going through.” She presses a hand against his upper back, instantly making him uncomfortable at the uninvited touch, and guides him to the door. As she opens it, she says “Take care of yourself, Keith,” and passes him off to Iverson, who stands waiting by the wall.

 

 

            The pamphlet, he sees when he finally looks at it, is all about the stages of grief. He tosses it onto his desk as soon as he returns to his dorm, letting the slick paper skid across the surface. It catches between the wall and the wood, sticking up like a spear lodged in the side of a dying animal. His discharge form slides into the space between the bed and the desk.

            Those three cadets are in the infirmary, they said. The one who started it has a concussion. Keith has bruises shaped like various hands around his upper arms and a long bruise along his collarbone from where people tried to hold him back. There’s a cut on his cheek and a large expanse of pinkish purple on his stomach which he catches sight of as he rips off the Garrison uniform and throws it toward his laundry bag. The jacket falls onto the box of Shiro’s things. Keith stops.

            He promised Shiro he’d stay focused on his studies. He promised he’d keep control of his temper, and that he wouldn’t cave in when the people who didn’t understand how hard he worked went around casting judgements and running their mouths. He promised he’d be here when Shiro got back.

            Shiro would be so damn disappointed in him.

            Keith feels like a failure. It wells up in his lungs and his throat, and he clenches his fists against the feeling. He jerks open the closet doors and grabs the first t-shirt and jeans within reach, dragging the clothes on with enough force to accidentally scratch himself. He barely feels it under everything else. He shoves his boots on and jerks open a duffle bag, then rips the hangers down, throwing things haphazardly into the bag. When he struggles to fit the clothes in along with the hangers, he says, “Fuck it,” and throws the hangers across the floor.

            He’s panting in frustrated agitation by the time he’s finished stripping the closet, each jerking motion loosening his hold on the bottled emotions that never seem to stop coming. He swings the closet doors shut with loud bang and looks to the desk.

            He scowls at the crooked pamphlet and feels an impulsive urge to tear it to shreds. Instead he kicks at the desk’s leg, and finds no satisfaction in it. He tries again, shaking the desk with enough force to send the pamphlet falling to the ground, but it still leaves him angry and empty. The desk knocks against the wall as he repeats the action over and over, frustration mounting higher with each dull thud, until he turns and kicks at the wooden bedframe instead. The impact hurts. With a curse, he does it again, harder.

            It’s exhilarating in an awful way. The sick thrill knocks something loose inside of him, driving him to some minor self-destruction with another pound of his boot. He doesn’t wait for the ache to stop before he kicks again, and then again, pummeling out a drumbeat that is rhythmic and far more controlled than anything he hopes to be.

            When the rage has subsided enough for Keith to reel himself back in, he stands panting and staring, first down at the visible dent he’s put into the frame, and then out the window as he lifts he head.

            He can see the flag from here, flying at full mast.

            For the first time today, he’s glad he’s leaving this place.

 

 

            When Keith leaves the Garrison he has two duffle bags and a rucksack to his name. A fourth of the bag on his right hip is taken up by the things Shiro left behind.

            Emancipated since sixteen and family-less without Shiro, Keith wanders the town beside the base until his legs ache. The main streets of downtown are so saturated with memories that he can't stand it, and so he keeps to the fringes, pacing beside picket fences and American dreams with his hands in his pockets and his body weighed down by more than the bags he hauls.

            His stomach is empty and his body is exhausted, but he can't find the energy to care.  He can't find the motivation to do _anything_ , besides wander. He has to keep moving. He doesn't know why, but every inch of him insists on movement. It's a misguided restlessness that does nothing to distract him from his mind.

            He consumes the last of his phone’s battery refreshing his email. The counselor emailed him a list of local psychiatrists, as if Keith has the money for that sort of bullshit. As if they could help him, after all the good she managed to do. Why would he pay someone to tell him he has no right to be outraged? To be desperately hopeful? He may be clinging, but he's clinging to the truth, god damnit, and he's proven he'll fight tooth and nail to defend that.

            He thinks again of what Shiro will say to him when he gets back and finds out Keith was expelled. Reality splashes cold in Keith’s face when he realizes that if he doesn’t know where he’s going, there’s little chance Shiro will even be able to find him once he makes it back. Guilt and fear cut through him and offset is stomach.

            Ever since meeting Shiro, Keith has never considered a life in which he would never see the older boy again. Even when Shiro was preparing for the mission, they’d talked about the after. Shiro knew for a fact the first meal he’d want to have once he got back would be a cheeseburger from that diner they always seemed to find their way to at stupid o’clock, and he’d said, grinning at Keith under a sky full of stars, there was no one else he’d want to share it with. But now, the more Keith thinks about Shiro coming home, the less it seems possible. Even if Shiro is alive, as he so desperately believes, the fact that _something_ went wrong out there is undeniable. Keith’s spent all his time angry with the Garrison for making up lies that he hasn’t stopped to really consider _why_ they made it all up. And if they’ve announced the crew’s deaths, that gives them the freedom to leave them stranded out there, to leave them for dead.

            Keith shudders in the desert sunlight, cold despite the merciless heat, and fights the stinging in his eyes, not sure if it’s sorrow or a physical reaction to his sudden nausea. Distantly he thinks he’s going to die from dehydration like this.

            He has to stop thinking. He has to get his mind together and survive for now. If he can survive the night, he can worry about Shiro in the morning. He takes in a few deep breaths and fixes his gaze ahead, trying his damnedest to block out any and all thoughts. Then he keeps moving. He has to keep moving.

 

 

            The moon is high in the sky by the time Keith staggers up to the abandoned shack he and Shiro have been repairing since Keith convinced him to come investigate a jackalope sighting. They never found the antlered rabbit, but this decrepit pile of old wood and mystery more than made up for that missed opportunity.

            The door creaks when he opens it and whines when it closes. A cloud of dust puffs around him as he falls face first onto the couch.

 

 

            There has never been any specific direction to Keith’s life beyond forward, but when he wakes the next morning, he feels as though Shiro’s disappearance has robbed him even of that. He barely has the energy to untangle himself from the bags he spent several unconscious hours twisted up in and turn to lay on his back, staring at the cracked ceiling.

            He aches from where the bags dug into his young bruises, from sleeping on the stiff couch, and from laying so awkwardly all night. Slowly the sun rises outside and bears down on the land, until the air is nothing short of sweltering.

            His discomfort wars with the emptiness he feels inside. Keith imagines himself to be hollow, his insides scraped out by the bulldozing force of the media’s words, the official reports, and the realization he came to yesterday afternoon that even if Shiro is alive, there’s a good chance he’s never coming back. He could very well die, stranded out there, just as everyone says he already has.

            Pieces of Keith fall out and die every second the world insists on _insisting_. As though his body is saying, if Shiro has to be dead, then I must be, too. Here in this broken down shack, he feels it.

            Yet somehow that emptiness is heavy. It's as if he isn't just hollowed out and full of stagnant air, light weight oxygen and carbon dioxide, but rather some denser gas. Like mercury. It drags him down, holding him in place. Rare and toxic.

            Keith has never given up before. While the sun boils the desert sands and draws sticking sweat from his pores, plastering his hair to his face and dampening his clothes, he stares at the ceiling and imagines he can see the stars. If every speck of dirt is a sun, every crack a comet or asteroid belt, every chip a planet, then somewhere up there, simultaneously within reach and beyond all forms of contact, is Shiro. Staring down at the same planets, comets, and sun.

            It isn't much, but it's enough to take some of the quicksilver out of his lungs. Enough to replace the metal with motivation, to draw hiss legs off the couch and his body to the half empty case of bottled water they left here six months ago.

            He chugs two bottles and makes a promise to the ceiling and the stars. One way or another, Shiro will reach out across the sky, and whenever he does, Keith will be there to take his hand.

 

 

            Keith hauls himself out to the secondhand generator they set up behind the shack. It's small, fickle, and dented, but after half an hour of coaxing, prodding, and banging, he has it humming back to life. There is no AC inside, but there is a fan, and he is an expert at making do.

            The generator takes gas, though, and there isn’t much available, only the small amount he and Shiro had bought just after they first set the thing up. If Keith isn’t sparing in his use, he’ll run out within a day or two.

            More pressing than even that is his need for food. Aside from the half empty box of protein bars that was mixed in with Shiro’s things, there is nothing in the shack, and Keith’s bank account is approximately fifteen dollars full. Without some means of earning money, he’ll starve to death before the end of the month, if he doesn’t die of heat stroke first.

            He needs to find a job. But spending the entirety of his day surrounded by other people doesn’t sound any better than life at the Garrison, and in the short time Keith’s spent away from there, he’s noticed a massive lowering in his stress levels. The thought of going right back out into the world with people who are going to keep telling him he should give up on Shiro is unacceptable.  

            So then, how does one make money without human interaction?

            He could sell his things, but he doesn’t have much to begin with, and his most valuable items – his laptop, and his knife – are out of the question either way. He frowns.

            He’s officially a high school dropout now, meaning his options are limited. At seventeen, he can’t work at most gas stations since they sell cigarettes – he remembers Shiro explaining that law in the winter of Keith’s freshman year, when he stayed at Shiro’s mothers’ house with him, and Shiro searched for a job to have for the duration of the break. Keith made himself useful by helping with home improvement tasks while Shiro ended up landing a job at the local grocery store, putting his muscles to use by unloading trucks and carrying heavy boxes full of canned goods.

            Keith’s strength is nothing to sneeze at, but it comes more in the form of powerful punches than the full body judo throws Shiro makes look so effortless. While a few crates wouldn’t be too difficult, he wouldn’t be as apt at it as Shiro was, and the constant reminder of him would be too much.

            His considers his other strengths. He’s decent at math, has always been far better at it than English, finding a comforting logic in the stark simplicity of numbers that has never been in words. But running a cash register all day means being a people person and welcoming customers, which is far from his best ability. In the end, the thing he’s always been suited to has been flying, or driving. Working with vehicles of any sort. But they don’t pay flight school drop outs to drive anything, especially not at seventeen.

            He sighs and sits on the couch, stomach rolling with hunger and a creeping anxiety. He has to figure something out. There’ll be no point in believing in Shiro if he dies before he gets back. If he gets back. No, he will, Keith decides. Keith will personally build himself a shuttle out of junk yard scrap, or better yet steal something from the Garrison if that’s what it takes to save Shiro. He’s not giving up on him. Shiro never gave up on Keith.

            It clicks, then, as his stomach and mind both churn, one with anxiety and the other with gears and blueprints for some craft that is much easier said than done, that his classes in basic mechanics could score him a job in a body shop somewhere in town. Working on cars, he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone about anything other than machines, and he could work in peace. It seems like his best bet.

            Keith grabs a water bottle and a protein bar and prepares for the long walk into town.

 

 

            Two of the local mechanics refuse to hire anyone without a degree, while another two refuse to hire minors, and Keith’s emancipated status isn’t enough to encourage them to bend that rule. Finally, he finds a small family owned father-son business that’s understaffed and used to teenagers, as the owner’s son is Matt’s age and has been working there since he was fourteen. After passing a test and proving his knowledge on an old car in the shop, Keith is welcomed with a greasy handshake, and finds himself with a proper source of income. He celebrates by going to the grocery store.

            Fifteen dollars is hardly enough for five frozen pot pies, let alone a week’s worth of proper meals, but Keith needs to make this work. Besides the financial limitations, cooking anything is out of the question. The shack is a singular room, comprised of a couch, a lamp, a corkboard, a bookcase, some abandoned machines, and a rotting plank of wood held up by concrete blocks. Now that Keith's moved in, he can add a modest collection of clothing, a couple textbooks, toiletries, his knife, and a laptop to the mix, but there is no stove, no refrigerator, no running water. Starting a fire in the desert will be hard without fuel, and Keith has never been able to do anything but burn food in a flame.

            That limits his options to nonperishables that don’t require heat, like cereal, or premade meals he can buy hot and eat then and there, such as fast food. In the end he comes away with a pack of water bottles, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a few cans of soup, which he resolves to eat cold. He grabs a box of plastic utensils as an afterthought.

            By the time Keith makes it back to the shack, the sun has gone down, and the desert chill is quickly settling in. He shivers as he sets his food on the makeshift coffee table and resolves to find some way to insulate the building soon.

            For now he opens a can of soup and looks out the window at the stars beginning to shine through. This time of year, Jupiter should be visible, but he can’t see it from this angle. He stares for a moment before grabbing his jacket and bringing his dinner outside, climbing the railing on the porch and dragging himself up onto the sloped roof. Up here he can see the whole of the sky if he lays on his back. Jupiter glows bright to his right.

            He wonders if Shiro is looking out at it now. Kerberos is much farther from Jupiter than Earth is. Does it seem smaller to him? Can he even see it at all? The thought makes Keith uneasy, because the longer he thinks about it, lain out on the cracked shingles and shivering in the freezing night air, the more it makes sense that Shiro wouldn’t be able to see anything besides Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune. He’d be able to see the sun, for sure, but if Keith can’t make out anything past Saturn, there’s no way they could be looking at the same planets. At the same night sky.

            The space above Keith’s head has never felt so lonely. It stretches and expands out beyond the reaches of his imagination, too vast for full human comprehension. Suddenly he feels imperceptibly tiny, like the nucleus of a single celled organism living at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Helpless and at the mercy of the tides of the universe. Lost at sea.

            What is he doing? Out here, laying on a dilapidated roof, eating cold soup out of the can like some railroad vagabond in an old movie. What’s the point? What is he achieving here? Living in the desert isn’t going to get him any closer to Shiro, isn’t about to bring the other home. If he’d just stayed in the damn Garrison he’d be on track to become a pilot. In one year he could have full status, could be selected for a mission, could be spaceborne and heading out there to find out what happened to the crew, to rescue them, even.

            That’s a fantasy, and he checks himself immediately. Whatever the Garrison’s reason for labeling Shiro’s crew as dead, it doesn’t bode well for their chances of survival. The Garrison wouldn’t make up a lie like that if they thought it was possible the crew would get back to Earth to prove them wrong, and they wouldn’t send Keith on an official mission out there to save the crew after this kind of cover up. The crew was supposed to be back six or so months from now – they only had enough resources to survive six or so months longer. Even if their life support systems were fully functional, which they may not be, they’d starve to death before Keith had any chance of graduation.

            He couldn’t save them there and he can’t save them here. In short, there’s nothing he can do except watch from a distance as Shiro slowly dies.

            It’s a helplessness that seeps into him faster than the desert’s chill, flowing like ice water in his veins and spreading insistently from his chest through the rest of his body, leaving him numb and heavy in its wake. Keith leaves the half-finished can of soup off to the side and simply lays on the roof, taking slow, struggling breaths. Each rattles in his chest, stretches him out to the point of aching, and leaves him emptier than before. His body feels too impossibly heavy to move, and he can’t find it in himself to even try.

            Hours pass like that, Keith tracking the movement of the stars as the world continues to spin on, unfazed. He cries for some of the time, and just stares blankly for the rest. Useless and empty. When the sun crawls its way onto the horizon, he finds just enough energy to drag himself off of the roof and inside to the couch.

 

 

            Some days are better than others. Some days Keith wakes up with actual feeling in his body and hunger in his stomach. Some days Keith eats all of his meals and gets to work on time. Sometimes he even chats with the owner, though always briefly. Some days he walks home feeling as though he’s accomplished something. As though Shiro would be proud. _Is_ proud, and is waiting for the chance to reach out.

            Other days, the vast expanse of dead space above him and the glaring emptiness of his inbox blocks out his other senses, rising high above him like a tidal wave. The crash is hard and unforgiving. Those days it’s rare for him to even crawl out from under the blanket he bought for the couch.

            In between the days, Keith begins to dream.

 

 

            _He is seventeen, but standing in the center of a living room he hasn’t seen in nearly a decade. It’s just as he remembers, cramped but lived in, with a woven blanket thrown over the back of the stiff, wooden framed couch and a pair of ugly pillows slouching against the armrests. Everything is earthy and warm, burnt sienna overlaying tan and brown in a natural sepia. Not much besides the couch is in focus, but Keith pays it little attention. There is something outside to be seen._

_A dust storm is coming, he thinks, as he steps out onto the porch. Where the neighborhood had been is a vast stretch of flat land, but perhaps it was always this way. The clouds in the distance are orange and brown as well, like the sands they will bring. Three days from now, he knows. The storm will come three days from now._

_There is something else, other than the clouds, that he wants to see. He feels an unwavering conviction to find it, whatever it is, in his chest, so he continues down the steps. The bottom one gives way under him, and he stumbles to his knees, the dirt scraping his palms. When he moves to stand, he catches a glimpse of amber eyes beneath the steps and frowns, crawling forward to investigate._

_It’s an animal. A small, warm mammal snuffling under the porch, picking at the sparse grass that’s forced its way up through the rocky ground. A rabbit, maybe. Keith reaches for it, swept up in some dangerous curiosity, and nearly brushes the animal’s coarse fur before it shuffles away. Definitely a rabbit. He pursues and reaches again, misses again, and in this manner the thing is coaxed out from its hiding place and into the desert – they’re in the desert now._

_It_ is _a rabbit, a desert jack rabbit with tawny fur, massive back legs, and a pair of small, thin antlers resting between its ears, like a deer._

_Keith has seen a jackalope – this jackalope – only once. Three days before his father disappeared._

_The animal hasn’t aged a day since then. It stares at him, with its large, amber eyes, and seems to wait. Keith isn’t sure what for. Against his thigh, his phone buzzes, and his heart skips._

_A notification of a new message in his inbox blinks at the top of his screen. In three swipes Keith has it open, and coughs out something that is both a laugh and a sob as he reads the address of the sender. His phone cracks from the force he uses to open the email._

_[to: kkogane1@ggarison.gov]_  
[from: tshirog1@ggarison.gov]  
  
            < Follow the rabbit. >

            _Keith looks up from his phone, toward the jackalope, but finds he is alone._

 

 

            Once he’s taken a few moments to blink awake and orient himself, Keith shoots his hand out toward his phone.

            There are no new messages.

 

 

            Once a month the shop closes early to tidy up the amassed mess of extra parts, stray bolts, and misplaced tools. Keith learns that a family owned garage means family storage as well when he finds a bag of golf clubs lurking in a cobwebbed corner.

            “Mom wanted them gone but Dad can’t let them go,” Jason, the son, says as he sets a metal toolbox on the wooden workbench. Keith nods as though he knows what that’s like and stares a moment longer, feeling like he’s looking in on something private, something he isn’t meant to see. A reminder of the distance between him and the ‘average’ person. The sensation sinks into his stomach, and Keith tears his eyes away, childish guilt prickling in the back of his throat.

            The notion of familial intimacy drags Keith’s mind off into space, literally, as his thoughts turn to the Holts. Jason reminds him of Matt, in a way that tends to leave him feeling lukewarm and guilty. It’s easier to talk to Jason than most, because of that faux-familiarity, but it also makes Keith feel as though he’s replacing the older cadet, or forgetting him.

            Keith continues sweeping away a month’s worth of dust and spiderwebs without much focus on the task. They weren’t terribly close, but out of all of Shiro’s friends, Matt was the most familiar. Where Shiro was endless willpower and perseverance when it came to school work, Matt got nearly as frustrated with work as Keith, and taught Keith how to take breaks effectively to counter that. He also knew how to draw out Shiro’s mischievous side, something Keith had been surprised to learn existed.

            Matt’s the one who came up with the code they used to send secret videos over the course of the trip. Keith can only hope he’s putting his intelligence to work now at finding a solution to the crew’s dire situation. It’s a slim chance, but one worth believing in.

            After the shop is swept and the tools are reorganized, Keith is tasked with putting away spare parts. Loose spark plugs are returned to the drawer, air filters checked over and filed away with the rest, various sensors delicately placed in a large cardboard box. When it comes to the multitude of belts spread out across the workbench, Keith is stumped. Anytime he’s needed to replace a belt, he’s found the one he needed on the bench. He isn’t sure where they even came from, or where he should put them away.

            Jason and his father are both outside of the garage, tending their own tasks, so Keith tries to find a home for the belts on his own. Each unfamiliar drawer he opens is filled with other things – valve caps, gaskets, fuses – so he turns his attention to the pile of boxes stacked between the largest workbench and the wall.

            Setting the belts aside, Keith carefully reaches up to drag down the top most box, finding it much lighter than he’d anticipated. Inside are various rolled up papers. Out of curiosity, he pulls one out, assuming they’re blueprints of some sort. Instead he finds what resembles a poster for a bedroom wall. It focuses on a certain circular part, and it takes Keith a long moment to recognize the piece as a necessary unit for a hovercraft’s liftoff. Intrigued, he sets aside the poster and pulls out another, smaller one, wondering if the whole box is about the mechanics of hoverbikes. The second poster, however, features a circular, purple star chart.

            He jumps when he hears Jason and his father returning and hastens to roll the posters back up, anxious he’ll be caught snooping in other people’s things. The last thing he needs is for his boss to think he’s trying to pry into their personal business. The posters refuse to cooperate with his fumbling hands, though, and when the rubber band he’s trying to force over the roll snaps, the star chart unfurls enough to slip from his hand and rattle onto the ground, rolling away toward the center of the shop. Keith curses under his breath. Hesitantly, he turns his gaze to meet his boss’s.

            The man looks curious more so than angry, which is a relief, but Keith is still afraid he’ll be angry once he sees what it is Keith was messing with. The boss stoops to pick up the escaped poster, and Jason stands beside him.

            Keith just barely hears him ask, “Is that one of Amelia’s?” His father nods slowly. There’s a distance in his eyes that has Keith’s chest tightening.

            Jason looks past Keith to the box, and then crosses the room. Keith backs away, raising his hands in preparation to defend himself, somehow, but Jason crouches beside the box and shuffles the posters instead, a soft smile on his face. The garage is uncomfortably quiet for several minutes, apart from the shuffling of papers. Keith stares and waits for a sign of what he’s supposed to do in this situation.

            “These have just been collecting dust in here,” the boss says at length. Keith shifts to face both father and son at the same time, cautiously eyeing the older man. He doesn’t seem angry yet, but Keith still feels uneasy.

            The poster rattles when it’s pointed at him. His eyes snap to it, a startled, “Sir?” escaping him as the star chart is waggled in his direction.

            “Take it,” his boss says. “God knows you’ll have more use for it than me. And here, take the glider one too. Maybe you’ll learn something – get yourself into the military, make a life.”

            Keith is staggered and confused when he is burdened with several posters as the sun sinks toward the horizon. When Jason claps a firm hand on his shoulder, he flinches. Whatever weight they’ve settled onto his shoulders, Keith knows he can’t bear it for long.

            So, in the weeks that follow, he begins to build.

 

 

            An insatiable conviction consumes his waking hours, while the ever illusive jackalope plagues his dreams. The jackalope has silver eyes, now, so much like Shiro’s, and it drags Keith through desert dunes as well as overwhelming memories, further and further from the place he began.

            The longer the dreams go on, the faster the jackalope escapes, and Keith is left with the desperate sense that time is running out.

            These dreams mean something, he’s sure of it. Deep inside, in the place where all his strongest gut feelings dwell, Keith has felt their tug. There’s a greater scheme he cannot fathom, linking him and Shiro and the desert together like the stars of a constellation. The lines are thin and dull from where he stands now, but Keith’s determined to put it all together.

            He begins by raiding scrap yards for the remaining glider parts he needs, tacking up the blueprints and the star chart, and writing out his dreams.

 

 

            The nights fall like shadows over water, breaking the desert's fever as the stars float in one by one, and Keith invariably watches the constellations until he falls asleep. Awake he finds no signs, while asleep he fails to understand them. The journal he’s started to keep in close detail quickly begins to fill.

            Two months have passed since the mission failure. The stars have told him nothing.

            He could have been up there. The knowledge lurks up like an animal and builds its nest into the center of his mind. If he’d worked harder in school, been better at delivering what the professors wanted, with perfect posture and unwavering conviction. If he’d studied Shiro harder, mimicked him better, he could have skipped ahead, ignored a year or two of school, vaulted a step or two of rank, and proven himself worthy of the mission.

            He could have been selfish and begged Shiro to stay, asked Shiro to wait for a mission they could take together. He could have payed closer attention to the video clips they sent. Spotted a sign, or a clue. Warned the crew. There must have been something he could have done. Must be something he still can do.

            The weekly logs are grainy on his laptop screen, but Keith perseveres. For hours he combs them over after working on the glider, analyzing every sound, every light in the background, until his vision becomes blurry and pixelated as well. Some nights, every frame seems to hold an answer, if only he could decipher it. Most nights, they’re just empty remainders of what had been, a few months ago. Ghost files. Ghost footage.

            The images haunt his waking hours, replaying in his mind as he works, consuming his senses and slowing his progress, until Jason or his father calls out a warning about his slipping wrench, spilling oil, misplaced cap. They weave their ways into his sleep as well, leaving him dreaming of jackalopes in zero-gravity, and space shuttles crash landing in the desert.

 

 

_When the burning streak of a shuttle breaching the exosphere passes overhead, Keith is ready. His glider is not, leaning against the porch railing, half-built, but it doesn’t matter when he gets it to start. Nothing matters more than reaching that landing site._

_The bike sputters and shakes, rattling and rickety underneath him as he urges it further, faster, racing the blaze above, even if it’s outpacing him by several thousand miles per hour. It doesn’t matter, nothing matters, except getting there. Not the sand whipping his face, nor the scattered rocks and flowering cacti, the skittering lizards. It all fades away with the land as Keith rushes past, cool night air pushing back his hair and snagging the breath out of his lungs._

_The glider shouldn’t be able to make it this far, but it does, carrying him further than he’s ever gone, running after that jackalope. He thinks he can spot it ahead, chasing that same streak in the sky, leading him deeper into the desert, toward massive, rocky cliffs._

_Suddenly he knows where they are, where they are running to. Where that shuttle will land and where the answers he’s been searching for in the desert lay. That yanking tug he’s felt in his gut ever since he moved out here is like a shove from behind, forcing him forward, forward, until even the glider is left behind, stalling out beneath him, and he flips over the handlebars like a ten year old breaking too fast on his bike._

_The rocky dirt in his mouth tastes too real to be a dream._

            He wakes up anyway _._

 

            Keith throws himself into building up the glider. If only he can finish it, maybe he can catch that shuttle, maybe he can get so far out into the desert that whatever this gut wrenching feeling is explains itself.

            The desert nights after work are unforgiving, and Keith can’t even work without the worn leather gloves he dug up out of the box of posters his boss gave him, but he pays it no mind. Space is colder than this. He has no room to complain.

            It crosses his mind, as he tightens bolts and tests polarity, that he is desperately clinging to any form of manual labor that comes his way. The alternative is to sit idle, with his thoughts, and allow the misery that nips at his heels like a starving dog overtake him.

            Keith has never given up before. He can’t afford to give in now.

            The work takes its toll on his sleep, cutting into the dreams of chasing that leave him feeling more exhausted than anything else. It must be evident on his face, because they keep asking him – his boss, Jason, clientele – if he’s doing alright. Day in and day out, “You alright there, Keith?” “Everything okay at home, Keith?” “Sleeping alright, Keith?” “You sure you don’t need a sick day?” “We can give you some time off, if you need.”

            Keith is in the middle of replacing a full set of spark plugs when Jason sidles up beside him, holding a torque wrench in pretense of looking busy. The job isn’t difficult, nor abnormal, which raises Keith’s suspicions that the other boy is trying to slack off without getting called out by his father. But Jason leans in a little too close, with an expression that’s a little too soft, and Keith fumbles with his socket.

            “Hey, Keith,” Jason says, soft and tentative, like he’s talking to a stray cat.

            “Hey…” Keith stares at him, waiting for whatever unsaid element lingers there, at the end of his name.

            Jason raises his brows and smiles like he’s asking a question. “I get the feeling you’re going through a hard time.”

            Keith grunts and gets back to work, offering a shrug before trading tools.

            “I just… I dunno,” Jason presses on. “Not a lot of kids wanna work in a shop like this, and less of them do it full time, so I figure you’ve already got a lot on your plate. But it doesn’t seem like you have anyone to help, either.”

            “I’m fine.”

            “I’m not trying to pry,”

            “I said I’m fine, Jason. Hand me that box.”

            Keith glares at his hands and wills the knot forming in his throat to go down. It sits heavy and painful, threatening to choke him as Jason hands over the spare plugs with a cautious look. Keith avoids eye contact.

            He’s nearly replaced all of the plugs before Jason tries again.

            “I don’t know what you’re going through, but… When my sister left, I was all broken up over it. At first I didn’t talk to anyone, and then I was angry, at my parents, at her friends, at her, or myself. It changed all the time, but there was just a lot of anger, you know? I dunno. What I’m trying to say is… Well after a while I started writing these letters.”

            Keith replaces the last plug and just stands there, tools in hand, staring down at the engine while Jason talks. He can’t pull away, and doesn’t dare meet the older boy’s eyes.

            “It was kind of dumb, I guess. It’s not like I could _send_ them to her, you know, since she ran away and everything – just up and disappeared. But it helped. Writing stuff down, I guess. Getting my thoughts out.”

            He pauses, either finding his words or waiting for Keith to say something. Keith doesn’t have anything he wants to say. He wishes Jason would just get back to work, so _he_ can get back to work, so he can stop thinking about this and busy his mind with menial tasks again. Sitting still and thinking like this is a slippery slope, and he’s sick of falling on his ass with nothing to show for it.

            “Maybe you should try it, is all I’m saying. Like, maybe it’ll help you, with whatever you’re going through. Since you don’t seem like you wanna talk about it.”

            “There’s nothing to talk about,” Keith mumbles, and fiddles with the wrench. Jason lingers for a moment, but takes the hint and goes back to his own work.

 

 

            When the exhausting waves of guilt next roll in, Keith digs out his old school things. One of the used notebooks still has a bit of blank loose-leaf in the back, unmarred by physics notes or distracted doodles. Keith debates between tearing out the pages or leaving them in the book, finally deciding it’d be less mess to just leave them. He fetches the pen he’s been using to catalogue his dreams, and tries not to feel stupid, writing Shiro’s name on the first line like a casual roommate note. Like Shiro will wake up and see Keith’s reminder to buy more milk.

            It takes him four tries to even settle on a way to start. _Shiro_ is too direct, _Dear Shiro_ feels wrong. _Hey Shiro_ is ridiculous, and _Hi_ … _Hi_ sounds like they’ve run into each other in the mess hall. Like he never left at all.

            His pen hovers over the paper, idly twitching with his fingers, writing nothing. What the hell can he even say? _Hey Shiro, I miss you down here, come back soon._ He feels sick at the thought. Hot and queasy and so fucking helpless. No piece of paper can bring them back, no amount of words will get him into space.

            Keith curses and tosses the pen down, dragging his hands over his face. His eyes sting, but no tears raise to the surface. They just linger there, heavy and insistent, and feeding into the overwhelming pressure he feels all throughout his body. It’s like he’s bursting at the seams with all of these tumultuous feelings, but there is no way for them to break out.

            Maybe this is what Jason meant, about the letters helping him to get his thoughts out. But even if that’s true, Keith has no idea how he’s supposed to start. If he pretends he’s actually writing to Shiro, like Shiro will actually read whatever he has to say, he can’t think of anything worth while to say that doesn’t sound like a crappy postcard. _Wish you were here._ _It’s not the same without you. Get home safe._

            With a shaking laugh that sounds more miserable than anything else, Keith slides his hands into his bangs and tries to imagine Shiro’s face if he got a postcard like that in space. What would he have said, if situations were different, if the mission was still underway? _Things are fine up here. Kerberos is out of this world. The food sucks, though._

_Be back soon._

            Keith breathes out in a shudder, sinking lower into the floor. _Soon._ Taking up the pen, he scribbles out a short note.

                        _Shiro,_

_I’m not sure where you are. But I’m going to bring you home._

 

 

 

 

                        _Shiro,_

_I got a job as a mechanic. It’s more like an apprenticeship, sort of, ~~but~~  I started like three months ago. I’ve learned a lot._

_How are you? How’s the crew? ~~Is it cold in space?~~ You said it was cold up there. Are you staying warm? The desert is ~~hot~~ the same. ~~I’m living out~~_

_I miss you._

_Shiro,_

_Sometimes I can’t sleep. I just lay here and sort of stare at the sky. I don’t think you can see Earth from ~~up there.~~ out there. I saw Mercury tonight. ~~It’s~~ I feel like you’re here, when I see them. Like you’re pointing them out. _

_That’s stupid. This is stupid._

_It’s been four months. ~~Since the news started lying saying all this shit~~_

_~~Since the news~~_

_Since I last heard from you. I’m trying to keep going, but it’s hard._

_Things are just harder now. Ever since you left._

_I’m building a glider. I’ve been buying and scavenging parts, fixing them up. A lot of it needs to be weatherproofed and all, still, but she’s almost ready._

_I keep dreaming about you, crashing down in the desert, and I race out there to save you. But my glider never makes it all the way._

_I think the dreams are trying to tell me something, but I don’t know what. I need to finish this glider and get out there. I_

            Keith pauses, using up the last of the space in the book. Starting these letters is always hard, but stopping in the middle of them is even worse, and the words on the tip of his pen have so much weight he can’t stand to leave them hanging there, unsaid, like so many other things. He already missed his chance to say something in person. The end of his final page of paper is just adding insult to everything else that’s happened.

            He tugs open his bag and riffles through it, looking for some scrap of paper he can use to finish the thought. The other notebooks are all filled up, flooded with scribbled out sketches of lecturing professors and other trivial things that irk him now. Wastes of space and ink, crammed into lined corners and margins. He tosses the books to the side.

            Down at the bottom of his bag is a mixed set of sticky notes, only half used. He frowns but concedes – Shiro wouldn’t mind, probably, if the last thoughts of the letter were tacked on to the end. It’s not as though Shiro will be seeing these, anyway.

            Peeling up a note, he presses it onto the page and writes the rest of his sentence.

_just wanna be riding it, and it’s killing me when you’re away._

            He finishes building the glider on a Saturday morning, squeezing the last of the work in before the sun reaches its peak. As soon as the thing is fully functional, he feels it: the itching tug in his gut that’s pulled him along through every recurring dream. Almost like a longing, though he feels it deeper in his chest. Whatever his dreams have been trying to tell him, now is the time to find out.

            Keith heads inside to fill his bag with some water bottles and food. He pauses at the coffee table, then grabs the journal he’s been using to catalogue his dreams and tosses it in with a pen. If he finds some sort of answer, some way to make sense of it all, he needs to be able to write it down.

            His work is solid. The glider starts with a pleasant purr, the handles comfortable under his palms. He makes a few circles around the shack, testing the steering and the lift. Takes note of the slight drift to its turns. Tries out the breaks. Everything works.

            When he pulls back around the front of the shack after his third loop, the urging feeling inside is overwhelming. The turn of the accelerator is almost instinctual, sending him whirring off toward the distant rock formations.

            It isn’t steering, so much as feeling out the lay of the land. Something in him says turn left at the cluster of cacti twenty minutes out, so he does.

            The sun is boiling. He has to stop to drink water and reapply sunblock, arms covered in the awful desert dust that will have to be washed away tonight, but even the five minute break kills him. There’s _something_ out there. He needs to keep moving.

            It’s nearly noon when he sees it. An odd cluster of rocks leaning against the base of a flowering cactus. It isn’t out of place, is perfectly in line with everything else he’s seen and expected to see in the desert. But the shape of it floods his stomach with ice water, an unnatural rush of freezing cold under the direct sunlight. He stops so hard the whirring fans kick up a cloud of dust, sending the few lizards that were sunning themselves skittering away.

            He’s seen this pile before. It isn’t just the echoing familiarity of déjà vu, or some mirage-esque illusion caused by the heat. He hops off the bike and kneels down, tracing over familiar cracks in the side of the center rock with an index finger. He knows the scratch of its grain against the palm of his hand before he even runs it over the surface.

            He dreamed it, once. There’s an entry in his journal, several pages back. Just a date and a pen sketch, but when Keith flips back there’s no denying it. The drawing matches up too well to be an accident.

            He flips to a fresh page and jots down the date. His heart races. The unignorable urging inside him was something to chase, something to keep him focused, but this. This is the first tangible, physical sign. Proof that his dreams _mean_ something. By the time he’s finished scribbling out a couple sentences, his hands are shaking.

            He should take a picture. Some way to keep that proof alive, so he’ll know it wasn’t just another dream. He snaps his journal shut and shoves it back in the bag, nearly dropping the pen in his haste, and fishes his phone out. It takes a few tries to get a steady image. He takes three, just in case.

            The aching need to press on surges up like fire finding fresh paper. Hot, rushing, urgent. He knows the way from here, even without the internal urge. Remembers which way the jackalope always runs. Hopping back on the glider, he kicks off, sending up dust as he rockets out toward the rocky cliffs.

            It takes another two hours before he gets past where the dreams always fall apart. The urgent pull of whatever it is he needs to find leads him closer and closer to the cliffs, but the nearer he gets, the wider it feels. Like a frayed string of yarn, what was first a single cord now branches out in several directions, none of which he can fully grasp. It seems like the entirety of the rockface is calling his name.

            He pauses for water and a lunch break and tries to make sense of it. It’s hard to think over the pounding that’s started up in his head – possibly dehydration. He downs an entire bottle of water in just a few minutes and feels a bit like he’s coming back to life. Definitely dehydration, then. There are two bottles left in his bag, so he forces himself to drink the next one slowly while he sorts his thoughts.

            He’s never come out this far before. The desert is huge, has always been huge in his mind, but it never really sank in just what that meant before now. He could walk for _days_ and never see another person. Just endless swaths of sand, clay, and brush. A seemingly infinite expanse of solitude. It gives him a little perspective on what it must be like for Shiro and the Holts.

            Everything always goes back to Shiro, even when he’s isolated like this. Chasing dreams in the dust and heat. Half the bottle’s empty now, so Keith caps it and puts it away for later. There are still a few daylight hours and the sun is so harsh it’s hard to think. He feels overstimulated from it, heat pressing him down to the ground while the dispersed aches of whatever it is he’s chasing rub him raw. He leans back against the seat of the glider, letting it hold some of his weight while he tries to breathe through this.

            For the first time since he set out today, he doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go. It almost hurts to be hanging back when he feels such a draw to those cliffs, but Keith’s lived out in the desert for years now. He knows better than to go wandering this late in the day. At this rate it’s going to take him most of the remaining daylight just to get back home, and he didn’t pack a second meal. There’s enough water to last him until sundown maybe, and that’s it.

            Keith’s impulsive, but he’s not crazy. He sighs and runs his hand through his hair, brushing it out of his eyes. It’s getting long, now. He’s considered cutting it, but he’s never really in the mood to go into town for it. His days off have been dedicated to putting together this glider and chasing shadows. Far more pressing than styling his hair.

            The glider hums back to life under his hands, smooth and ready. It takes him a deep breath before he can turn away from the rocks and go back the way he came.

 

 

He dreams, and he dreams, and he dreams.

            _The streak of the shuttle coming down looks like a meteor at this distance, shining bright in the midnight sky. Keith’s already on his glider and rocketing over sand and stone. It feels different this time. More certain. Predetermined, predestined. Guaranteed._

_Something has changed, now that his glider is fully functioning. He turns at the flowering cactus and sees the jackalope running even with the nose of his glider, no longer out pacing him. The wind pushes back his hair the same way it pushes the animal’s fur, lifting it up out of its dark eyes. Shining grey and more human than anything he’s seen in weeks._

_The jackalope blinks with Shiro’s eyes and takes the lead._

 

 

            Every day off, Keith glides out to the same rock face and stares at the towering cliffs, looking for some sign as to where he should go next. On his second trip he turns to a fresh page in his journal and sketches out the shape of the cliffs, and that night he pours over the drawing after dinner in his shack. The formation looks the same as all the others out in the desert – tall, neutrally tan, and smoothed at the edges from centuries of erosion. It’s familiar in the way that all stretches of flat rock are familiar out here, part of the pattern that is nature.

            But even the drawing of the cliffs makes something at the back of his lungs ache with longing. He stares at it for over an hour, finger tracing the lines of shading until he’s smudged the ink. There’s a dull throb in his temple like the beginnings of a headache. He rubs at his eyes to try and chase the strain away, but it remains, even after he forces himself to snap the journal shut and lay down on the couch. The image is seared into his mind’s eye, and he picks it apart some more as he waits for sleep.

            On the third trip out, he takes photos on his phone of the cliffs, and that night he roots through the abandoned machines in the shack until he hooks up a printer. The pictures are bigger when printed out. He lays them side by side on the makeshift table and flips through his journal, going back and forth between the drawings he made and comparing the four.

            He studies the shape of the ridge of the cliffs, looking for some image in the negative space of the jagged edges, like the Rorschach images that are at once a vase and a kissing couple. But if there is an object hidden in the silhouette of the rock, it’s not any he recognizes. He checks the darker lines of his sketches against the printed photos, in case he subconsciously noticed a clue he hasn’t put together yet, but nothing makes sense.

            By the time Keith pulls himself away from the table and stands to stretch his cramped limbs, it’s nearly three am. He groans. There’s a morning shift waiting for him at nine, and it’ll be several days before he has the time to make the full day trek to and from the cliffs again. It feels wrong to weave his trips around the work week, as though he’s prioritizing the wrong things. He needs the money he earns in order to eat and sustain himself, but compared to the hollowed out, raw ache he feels pulling him toward the desert, hunger seems negligible.

            It’s not a healthy way to think. He’s self-aware enough to recognize that. It’s hard to care about his health when this feels so much more important, so much bigger than him, but when Keith looks around the room, to the machines collected up against the corner, he sees his father in his mind’s eye. Turning dials of a similar machine at home and clutching headphones to one ear. Every night, several hours a night, obsessed with something outside of his reach.

            No one checks those old scanners anymore for whatever he hoped to find.

            If Keith’s going to solve this, he needs to make sure he stays alive to do it. He can’t quit his job. What he can do is use it to help him. Find a way to cycle the money into his search for answers.

 

 

            _The jackalope runs alongside him until they reach the cacti. By now he knows to slow for it as it curves out in front of him again, blinking over its shoulder. Shiro’s eyes check to make sure he’s following as the animal guides him to the cliffs._

_Oftentimes he loses sight of it just before the rocks, but not tonight. Tonight the shuttle streaks the sky directly overhead, the light of it wiping out any shadows the jackalope could slip into. The light catches on all the edges of the cliffs and exposes a barely there path Keith’s never seen before. The animal darts down it and cuts a turn between the rocks._

_His glider shouldn’t fit, but it does. Rocks and sand kick up under its fans as he races through the crevice and the jackalope blinks grey eyes back at him as it tears down the path. It’s so narrow that the only bit of sky above their heads is completely filled by the shuttle’s white light. He can almost feel its heat on his skin, warm like the sun, but with a gentleness the desert has never had._

_Keith nearly crashes when a curve leaps up in the path where before it was straight. It winds right and then immediately left, lifting first up and then downhill. It shifts so quickly that all he can see of the jackalope is its tail as it whips around the next bend, silent paws sure and never slowing. He nearly loses it when the path branches, reflexes snapping to turn after it last second. The shuttle seems to turn with them._

_The light it casts down is blue, now. It pours down the sides of the rock, washing over it like water, until it_ is _water. Keith slows to watch, and then reaches out to stick his hand in one of the streams. His fingers part the flow, cool water coursing around them and giving him a quick glimpse at some dark opening behind the stream before it’s all gone._

_The cliffs, the water, the shuttle, the jackalope. Everything disappears._

 

 

            When his next paycheck comes in, Keith goes straight to the store. He comes home with a few hundred thumb tacks, a bundle of red yarn, and a large map of the desert, which he pins up on his corkboard beside the star chart as soon as he gets home. It takes him some time to work out where exactly the landmarks he’s been cataloging fall on the map, but once he thinks he’s found the right places he circles them in pen and tacks string to the map, stretching it out and tacking the other end to the sketched and printed pictures he’s been pouring over.

            He scrawls notes on the map and then takes a step back, eyes scanning. The board still looks bare, like there are too many pieces of this puzzle missing. He frowns, feeling the encroaching pressure of frustration. His dreams only take him one place, over and over again. Out to the same cliffs he’s circled near the top of the map. There isn’t anything else to add to the board, there aren’t any other clues.

            He turns back to the table and the little journal he’s been keeping record of his dreams in. He tore out his sketches to put them on the board, but maybe he should be looking deeper.

            Keith picks up the book and leafs through it, finding the first entry he made about the cactus landmark. He rips it out and tacks it up by the sketch, connecting it to the map. He skims through and finds other entries about that place and adds them, and then tacks up anything he has on the cliffs. When he finds a sketch of the jackalope he puts that up off to the side and connects any references of it back to the drawing.

            It only takes a few more strings before he says fuck it and starts tacking up every scrap of paper he’s written on, just in case. He underlines and circles sections of his journal entries, marking any repeating themes he can find, no matter how irrelevant. Shiro’s name gets underlined over and over again, each dart of the pen tightening his chest just a fraction more.

            He connects them all to his collection of unsent letters in the left hand corner. A sticky note falls from the back cover of his notebook, bright yellow with something scrawled across it. He scoops it up and skims it, breath catching when he sees what he wrote ages ago now. Delicately, he presses the note onto the end of its corresponding letter and takes a deep breath to center himself. His handwriting stares back at him: _and it’s killing me when you’re away_.

            Keith takes a few steps back. Now the board is a spiderweb of crisscrossing red string connections, like something out of a crime show. He feels a little crazy, looking at it and feeling the desperate urge trapped in his chest that says there’s got to be something here.

            But now that he can see it spread out like this, interlaced across the board, he knows for certain. All of it leads back to Shiro.

            Somehow, Shiro is steering him out to those cliffs, guiding him through his dreams and trying to show him something. Keith can’t help tracing the red strings back to his name. There isn’t a piece of paper on this board that can’t be traced to those letters.

            Keith cuts another string and tacks it there. “I’m coming, Shiro,” he murmurs as he pins the other end to the cliffs. “I’ll go anywhere you want me.”

 

 

            Keith wakes up early Saturday morning from another dream of chasing the jackalope through tight desert canyons and past secret waterfalls. He takes a moment, staring up at the ceiling and thinking. There’s a feeling in the back of his mind as something in him aligns itself. Like he’s falling into place.

            He rolls off the couch and heads to his bag, quickly packing his journal and bottles of water. He takes enough for two days, then pauses, considering, and decides to add a little more, just in case.

            Two and a half days’ worth of canned food and bottled water is heavy, but there’s room for him to cram his blanket into the pack and squeeze in his favorite jacket after it. The weight of the bag is nothing compared to the dangers he’d face without it in the cold of the desert night.

            The sun is still low on the horizon when he sets out. The wind is cool as it whips against his face and wakes him fully. After a few minutes the adrenaline kicks in, and that familiar desperate urgency with it. With every mile that flies past, the draw grows stronger, mounting toward some peak that he’s determined to reach before nightfall.

            Tonight’s the night he’ll find answers. He can feel it.

            There’s a thrumming in his veins he hasn’t felt in months. Determination and a clear, confident purpose. It’s the same feeling that pushed him to the Garrison, the same feeling that propelled him to the top of the sim scoreboards. It’s like everything he’s done so far has been leading up to this day, to the moment he reaches the cliffs and suddenly knows which path he’s meant to take between the rocks.

            Forcing himself to stop and take a lunch break is difficult when he feels so much energy humming inside of him, but the cry of a bird of prey as it comes to roost somewhere in the rockface is sobering enough. Keith steers the glider into the shade of the cliffs and slides off, settling to sit against the rock for lunch.

            The sun is high in the sky, early afternoon. It means the longer he spends exploring these cliffs, the later at night it’ll be by the time he gets home. If he goes home at all. Keith shifts the blanket aside to tug out another water bottle. The Garrison had mandatory survival classes for all the freshman, to arm them with skills they might need in the event of a crash or marooning. He knows how to find good shelter out here, and what to look for in a safe place to sleep. How to build a fire from the brush lining the base of the cliffs.

            Before, he would have turned back at this point, but now he knows where he’s meant to go. The tugging in his chest is still divided, spread out across the expanse of rocks, but if he just follows the path he took in his dreams, he knows he’ll find whatever it is that he’s been drawn to all these months.

            It doesn’t matter how long it’ll take to get there. He’s prepared to sleep out here, among the stars and the stone, if that’s what it takes to find it.

            Keith packs his trash up and hops back on the glider. The path the jackalope took isn’t clear in reality, but he’s followed it enough nights this week to know where it is. At the second outcropping he makes a turn and finds not a winding canyon nor streams of mysterious water flowing down the rocks, but a corridor between the cliffs and the mouth of a cavern, yawning wide in front of him with a hunger that echoes the desperate aching in his chest.

            Keith pauses long enough to judge whether or not his glider can fit inside. Deciding it’s safer to leave it outside, he parks and slides off, pack in hand and zero hesitation in his stride.

            The cavern bends a few feet from the entrance, so he pulls his phone out of the pack and turns on its flashlight, wary of any sudden drop-offs that could be lurking in the shadows. He keeps one hand on the left wall in case the path splits and slowly makes his way through.

            He’s never been in a cave like this. The temperature change from the outside air is drastic as the path dips downward into the ground, enough so that he’s considering digging out his jacket. But there’s more than just a chill in the air. Something about the way his steps echoes off the stone makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and he almost thinks he can hear something further in. A far off hum, like the push and pull of sleeping breaths, or the brush of rising tides against sand.

            It feels like another presence is here with him. Watching him.

            Keith flinches back at the feel of a harsh edge under his hand and flashes the light at the wall.

            “Whoa.”

            It isn’t the start of an insect’s burrow, like he’d feared. Instead his light catches on the ridges of some sort of carving. He takes a step closer and traces the grooves, wondering what it’s supposed to be, and how long it’s been here. The lines are straight cut and geometric, almost like they were stenciled in, but he can’t be sure. Whatever it’s supposed to be looks a bit like a face, but the width of the head and the jut of the jaw makes it also look like an animal. Not a coyote – it’s too square. This is almost like a mountain lion.

            A wave of fear strikes through him. What if it _is_ a mountain lion? He knows they prowl around rocks like these and live in caves. That sensation of being watched… he could very well be prey.

            Slowly, he lowers a hand to the knife on his belt and pulls it free. He focuses on steading his breathing and then listening, eyes darting around, trying to catch sight of anything that might be around him. If he moves too quickly, he could trigger an attack, if there is a predator here.

            Something is off, though. The sound he hears isn’t close by, even though he can practically feel its presence. He strains his ears for it, but no matter how hard he focuses that doesn’t help. In fact, it’s less a sound and more an… energy. Something he can feel in the air. In the back of his mind.

            His eyes catch on something just outside the circle of his flashlight. Slowly he shifts, just enough to inch the beam along until he realizes he’s looking at the shape of another carving. There are rounder lines in this one. With a cautious glance of his shoulder, Keith decides to risk it and moves to investigate.

            His steps echo, and no predator leaps out at him, but he keeps a tight grip on his blade. This carving has little stick figures standing around some sort of giant… statue? Animal? It seems to have the same sort of face as the first carving, but the people are only as tall as its paws.

            How old are these carvings? There’s no way there could have been actual animals this big in this area at the same time as people, right? Maybe the giant mountain lion was a deity for the people who drew this. Keith frowns as he considers it. People have always worshiped animals around them, but he didn’t think there were native peoples living out in this desert hundreds of years ago. He can’t remember learning about any that worshiped a god like this.

            He glances over his shoulder, and then shines the light around just to be sure there really isn’t an animal with him in the dark. After he’s sure there’s nothing, despite the presence in the back of his mind, he sheaths his knife and digs in the bag for his journal to rub an imprint of the carving onto a page.

            As the beast takes shape on the page Keith wonders why he’s never heard of these carvings before. Are they only in this cave? Somehow he knows that isn’t right. There’s something familiar about them, in a déjà vu sort of way, and he’s starting to think that the way the lines catch his eye is more than idle curiosity. It’s hard to look away from the images, especially of the lion’s face. It’s almost as though it’s staring back at him – as though it can see him.

            It doesn’t feel right to say that these drawings are what he’s been drawn to all this time, but it also feels wrong to say they aren’t. It’s confusing, so he tries not to focus on it as he moves to trace the other carving as well. But the way the tether seemed to split off once he hit the cliffs… If there are more caves like this one, that would explain why he feels so many pulls at once. They must all be full of these strange carvings.

            There are more further in. He follows the trail, soon giving up on sketching every one when he sees just how many litter the walls. If there are so many but he’s never heard of them in school, then maybe he’s the first person to come out here in recent history. It’s a wild thought, but it makes sense the longer he thinks about it. Not many people come out to the middle of the desert like this, and surely if it were an archeological site, they’d have sectioned it off, or at least turned it into some kind of tourist attraction. No one would leave this place untouched like it is now.

            He could call it in to some society, let scientists and anthropologists know what he found. But then they’d restrict access. The thought sets off alarms and red flags in his mind, and his gut tells him it would be dangerous to share this, though he doesn’t know why.

            Whatever he expected to find out here, it wasn’t a dead end cave full of lion carvings. Keith pauses when he sees the rounded space he’s come to at the end of the narrow pass. The little cave is coated in carvings, but aside from that he can’t find any signs of life. No bones or scraps or claw marks to show an animal made its home here. Just smooth stone and twenty lions set in the walls.

            He needs to be here. He isn’t sure why, but he knows it to be true. It’s the one clear thought he has in the midst of all this mystery, and he’s going to take it.

            His phone’s clock says it’s getting late – nearly sundown. The cave doesn’t seem like a bad place to spend the night. Some ancient peoples must have thought so too, if they put up so many dedications to their lion god. So long as he makes sure animals don’t come wandering in, he should be alright to sleep here.

            He heads back to the entrance and moves his glider so it blocks the way in. Out in the fading light of the sun he pulls on his jacket and gathers what he needs to make a campfire at the front of the cave, to be sure the smoke will go out into the night air. Then he settles down to eat and stare up at the stars, wondering if this is what Shiro wanted for him.

            It’s a bit crazy, to think Shiro has anything to do with these carvings in these caves, but Keith can’t think of any other way to explain how he knew they were here. Why he’s been dreaming of this place every night for months since Shiro’s ‘death’. Nothing else has ever called his attention like this, has ever meant so much to him.

            Eventually he uses a bottle of water to put the fire out and heads back to the closed end of the cave. The walls are close enough that some of his body heat is trapped in, and with his jacket and the blanket he brought, he finds he’s able to keep warm enough to fall asleep beneath the carvings.

 

 

            For the first night in months, he doesn’t dream of Shiro. He’s disoriented by it when he wakes up, images of giant, colorful cats seared into his mind’s eye but as difficult to pin down in the waking hours as smoke.

            The humming pressure in the back of his mind feels just a little bit louder, now. The tug that brought him here is a little more solid.

            This isn’t just about Shiro, he realizes with a clarity he doesn’t fully understand. There’s something more.

            Something bigger.

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes: One of the themes of this piece is adults attempting to help Keith but inevitably failing him despite their intentions. I imagine there is a lot more to Iverson's actions than we see through Keith -- Keith is an unreliable narrator and Iverson makes brash decisions as he manages his own grief at having lost the Kerberos crew.  
> Furthermore, while Keith's counselor is not very helpful, (most) real counselors are extremely helpful and can really help you sort your troubles. If you are facing issues like anxiety or depression, please do consider therapy, and don't be turned away by the fictional depiction of it here.
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. It's been a great journey, and I can't wait to continue the story!
> 
> Find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/maplmoosemuffin) or [Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/MapleMooseMuffin). <3


End file.
